Loving newsprint

The Courier-Journal recently published an article about a fundraiser at the Louisville Central Community Center to celebrate my 80th birthday. No, I can't believe it either.

Over the years the publishers of The Courier-Journal have printed a lot of my letters, and supported my work in civil rights and affordable housing.

I know in an age of bloggers, e-mailers, tweets and other fascinating ways to avoid newspapers and to keep my brain "sharp," I should be learning newer ways to find out what is going on in Panama. I know I am expected to be conversant with all kinds of alternative media But I cling to my daily newspapers like a baby to its pacifier ... I can't be weaned off.

If you are in your early life, you don't get it. You were brought up with computers and megabytes and windows and all that jazz.

You don't think you are missing anything. I don't believe that.

You are missing relationships with local media collectors and distributors of news, with men and women who can give you fast feedback on your point of view and distribution of that point of view to the muddled masses yearning to be free of anything that has the word gigabyte in it.

So this is a love letter to a newspaper that has always been on my front porch in the morning and always will be. It may print this letter or it may not. Either way it lands at my house like clockwork unless a tornado or a fire interrupts its publication.

On my 80th birthday, and on any I am lucky enough to celebrate in the future they have been important to me. My only complaint is that it has begun to feel like a paper napkin owing to that alternative media. Save me from these obsessive alternatives. Newsprint, live on!

SUZY POST

Louisville 40206

And so it goes ...

Here we go again. The state cuts the schools' budget, so property owners take another hit. The water company needs to upgrade its equipment, so the rate climbs ever higher. As a final insult, now cities are whacking shoppers for their share of our paychecks, yet we ignore the dead horse in the room: Every year, the brigands in Frankfort confiscate two-thirds­-yes, that's 67 cents out of every dollar­-from both the state and federal income taxes paid in Jefferson County. And why do they need our money? To support the supernumeraries who run Kentucky's 120 counties, while California, with nine times the population, has only 58. And we wonder why Louisville is always short on cash!

JOHN GAMEL

LOUISVILLE 40207

Advice for Sebelius

I have some unsolicited advice for Kathleen Sebelius regarding how to fix the dysfunctional website for the national health care enrollees. All she has to do is hire the National Security Agency's techies and hackers. Not only can they make the website hum along, they probably have more than half the information needed on potential and future enrollees due to their psychic powers connecting them to Google and Yahoo. Bazinga!

I am positive it would be a win-win for everyone all around especially those folks lost in cyberspace on all the cable news outlets reporting the glitches. Google, anyone? Just nod and say "Yahoo."